Anne Hathaway Calls Abortion ‘Mercy.’ The Bigger Question Is Chilling.

So we are calling abortion an act of mercy now?

According to actress Anne Hathaway in an interview on “The View,” “abortion can be another word for mercy.”

We are all used to the euphemisms that surround abortion; they’ve been an essential part of keeping it a socially acceptable practice despite its gruesome realities.

“Mercy” felt like a new one; it turns out it was a recently resurfaced remark made years ago. But it caught my attention in the wake of the Lindsay Clancy trial. One of the theories put forth by the many mental health and medical professionals who testified in her case argued that she believed she was committing an “altruistic filicide.” That is a medical term for when a parent kills their child in what they believe, in an altered mental state, that their child will be better off dead than alive.

It is by definition a textbook act of an insane person, and yet here in America, glossy-lipped celebrities like Anne Hathaway are trotting it out with a big-toothed grin on morning television to be consumed by an almost entirely female audience. As if it’s a completely normal concept.

And then a look to the north finds our neighbors in Canada have recently revived a discussion about whether or not Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) — yet another euphemism, this time for assisted suicide — can be used on certain disabled newborns. Or, in the euphemistic terms of the medical body — the Quebec College of Physicians — arguing it can, and should be, used on babies up to a year old who, in their words, “are born with severe deformations, very grave and severe medical syndromes, whose life expectancy and level of suffering are such that it would make sense to ensure that they do not suffer.”

Mercy.

More like, “Lord have mercy!”

What are we even doing here? I don’t know if Lindsay Clancy lost her mind. But it certainly feels as though we are collectively losing ours as a society. Late-term abortion for “fetal abnormalities” has long been framed as a moral choice, supposedly sparing the baby a life of suffering.

There is nothing merciful about killing an innocent child. Ever. And yet this is the very basis of the abortion industry’s argument in support of legal late-term abortion for babies with disabilities. Just look at the case of McKenna West, the surrogate mother who had to flee the couple that hired her for her womb and pressured her to abort as soon as they learned that the baby had a heart condition. And a treatable one at that. Their argument, after they then sued her when she refused, according to one major media outlet? That “the biological parents insist they only want what’s best for their child.”

Sparing an unborn baby a life of suffering is, in reality, sparing a baby its actual life, and the parents, and society by extension, of the obligation to care for that life.

But the “mercy” argument is seeping into the abortion debate more broadly. Just last week, a woman went viral on X for saying on The Postpartum Podcast about her abortion, “I got the abortion because I loved my baby, and I could not see a better way to love my baby and to protect my baby…”

The clip went viral during the peak of Clancy trial fever, as women lined the streets in pink to show their support for a woman who had purportedly done that very thing, in a postpartum state no less.

In the middle of all of this, Gloria Steinem dies. A woman who perhaps more than any other helped to normalize and even glorify abortion. She herself aborted her only child, something she called an “ethical act,” “a profoundly moral decision,” and “positive.” Just weeks after the governor of Massachusetts signed a late-term abortion bill, surrounded by beaming, clapping women.

I didn’t sit on Lindsay Clancy’s jury. I don’t know whether she is guilty.

What I know is that I do sit on the jury of our society; we all do. And we have long been conditioning the waters for a world where we accept the murder of innocent children, be they in the womb, on a doctor’s table, or in the basement of their home.

Our claim to civilizational sanity depends on our conviction that it is never, ever merciful.

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Ashley McGuire is a senior fellow at The Catholic Association.

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